J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative By Gillian Dooley

“he must grit his teeth and pay, what else?” for his brief liaison with his student Melanie. But he refuses to cooperate with the compromise suggested by the university's disciplinary board, the “prudent” approach which might save his job—undergoing counseling, making statements to “demonstrate his sincerity,” all the mealy-mouthed pieties of modern sociopsychology. He complains to his daughter, “It reminds me too much of Mao's China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology. I'm old-fashioned, I would prefer simply to be put against a wall and shot” (D 66). So he loses his job, a matter of little regret in the rationalized university of the 1990s, where his interest in the Romantic poets was barely tolerated in the new discipline of communications that has replaced classics and modern languages. He visits his daughter on her small farm, far from Cape Town, and at the end of the novel is working in an animal refuge, helping to put unwanted dogs down and dispose of their remains in the way he regards as fitting:

Is it a penance, one which he can accept because it is self-imposed? Or does he identify with the dogs, disposed of because they have no place in the modern human world, with their natural but inconvenient desires? He tries to explain to Lucy: